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Digital Banking: Give Customers What They Want

Customer engagement platforms often underperform when designed only with the bank’s goals in mind. To truly transform engagement and service delivery, banks must first understand what their connected customers want, and then design engagement platforms to meet those needs.

Disruptive forces are driving profound and rapid change throughout the banking sector. Among them, new regulatory and compliance requirements, and a host of new product offerings and go-to-market strategies are conspiring to make agility a requirement to compete. Meanwhile, customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their interactions with banks. Digital and self-service channels have empowered them to interact with banks in new ways. Virtual banking is now an industry standard, and mobile, social, and digital offerings are table stakes for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.

Perhaps more important, as banks diversify their offerings beyond core banking services (e.g. loans, mortgages, transaction services), customers expect that all bank offerings will be part of a connected whole. In other words, they expect that when one line of business captures data, it shares it throughout the organization. Customers don’t want to be asked for the same information more than once and conversely don’t want to have to make the same request more than once.

In response to these and other disruptive forces, some banks are investing heavily in a variety of customer experience technologies that they hope will simplify processes, create omnichannel customer experiences, and transform data architecture. Unfortunately, some of their efforts are ill-conceived: they are designed primarily with the bank’s needs in mind, rather than the customer’s.

Before jumping in and spending heavily on a grab bag of digital tools to accomplish ill-defined goals, it is important to identify the digital banking experiences customers want and the process flows, systems, and digital capabilities the bank will need to deliver those experiences.

Imagining the Customer Journey

As they conceive IT initiatives, CIOs and other IT planners typically create a process flow diagram to show how, post-implementation, data will flow through departments, systems, and tools. In crafting diagrams for customer engagement initiatives, some organizations are failing to consider the connected customer’s perspective on and expectations of the omnichannel experience the banks hope to create. In other words, they are designing customer journeys banks want, rather than ones customers want.

To sidestep this potential problem, CIOs and IT planners should consider spending some time prior to creating process flows thinking about the customer’s digital journey, and how the company will deliver value to customers at every point of interaction along the way.

Customer journeys demonstrate how value is delivered as customers interact with different parts of the organization, across different channels, through both physical and digital experiences. They typically start with a value proposition. For example, if the goal of a digital engagement initiative is “increasing revenue through cross-business line collaboration,” planners would analyze all the channels (phone, in-person, online) that customers use currently to purchase products and services from each business line (e.g. retail banking, financial planning, business services). They would then frame a set of interactions, capabilities, and processes that would make it possible for customers to purchase products and services seamlessly across channels in an efficient, simple omnichannel experience.

Customer expectations vary, as do the journeys banks enable through their engagement platforms. There are, however, several fundamental—and increasingly common—expectations that banks are addressing:

Customers want to know that banks really understand who they are. One strategy for making customers feel understood involves creating a “single source of truth” data management system that provides a 360-degree view of each individual as a customer. That view should be accessible to every bank employee with whom customers interact.

Likewise, customers expect banks to reuse data in ways that save them time and eliminate duplicative conversations. Data architecture should circulate customer data among all platforms, applications, and channels in the enterprise.

Customers expect to be able to interact with banks through any channel. To meet this expectation, IT can design engagement platforms to ensure that all customer-facing solutions are intuitive, smart, and simple, with a focus on usability.

Transforming customer engagement platforms to attract, retain, and expand customer relationships is not easy. In many banks, organizational fiefdoms and entrenched policies and processes stymie efforts to create seamless, omnichannel customer journeys. CIOs often encounter political resistance from various lines of business, even when the changes they are proposing promise revenue growth. As such, executive sponsorship of customer engagement initiatives is critical to success.

In 2015, disruptive forces will continue to drive change throughout the banking sector. In fact, the pace of this change will only increase. The time to act is now. Forward-thinking financial institutions are already taking proactive steps to fundamentally reimagine customer engagement and the systems and processes that enable it. Institutions not actively looking for ways to better engage the connected customer are leaving themselves open to aggressive competition.

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